The Golden Trowel

A retelling based on Mahmúd's Diary by Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání (George Ronald), the day-by-day chronicle of 'Abdu'l-Bahá's travels in America, from the entry for 1 May 1912. The narrative is retold in our own words. Read the full text for the original entry.

On Wednesday, the first of May, 1912, 'Abdu'l-Bahá went out from Chicago to a quiet stretch of open land beside Lake Michigan, at a place called Wilmette. There was nothing there yet — only the ground, and the wind off the water, and a gathering of friends who had come from across America and from the lands of the East.

For years the believers had dreamed of raising a House of Worship on this spot — a Mashriqu'l-Adhkár, a "Dawning-Place of the Mention of God," the first of its kind in all the Western world. They had purchased the land; they had prayed over it; and now the One they revered as the Centre of the Covenant had come, in person, to begin it.

'Abdu'l-Bahá walked the boundaries of the property, taking its measure. Then He entered a great tent that had been pitched to hold the assembled company, and spoke to them — not about architecture, but about the deeper building the temple was meant to serve: the power of this Cause to gather the East and the West, so long strangers to one another, into a single embrace.

When He had finished, Miss Nettie Holmes brought forward a trowel of gold, fashioned especially for the day, and placed it in His hands. And then the Master did the thing the friends would tell their children and their children's children. He did not merely consecrate the ground with words. He bent down to the earth, and with the trowel in His own hands He broke the soil and dug the place for the foundation stone, and set the stone in its place Himself.

After Him came the others — one by one. The delegates from the American assemblies, the representatives of the friends of Persia and India and beyond, each took up the same trowel and added their own turning of the earth, until the first labor of the temple had passed through many hands of many nations. What had been a bare field was now a beginning, opened by the hands of 'Abdu'l-Bahá and continued by people who, a generation before, might never have stood together at all.

He moved among them afterward with the warmth they had come to cherish, and then He was gone, back toward the city. But the ground was no longer empty. Beneath it lay a stone He had set with His own hands — and above it would one day rise the luminous temple that still stands in Wilmette today, its nine doors open to every people, exactly as He had foretold that windblown morning.

This account is retold for the Bahai Story Library; it is a paraphrase, not the original text. See Mahmúd's Diary (Mírzá Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání, George Ronald) for the original entry.

Maḥmúd-i-Zarqání, M.. (1998). *Mahmúd's Diary*. George Ronald. https://bahai-library.com/zarqani_mahmuds_diary